IASA Institute of Accelerating Systems and Applications (GR)

IASA

The Institution

The idea of establishing a University in Greece emerged alongside with the Greek War of Independence, also known as the Greek Revolution. The National and Kapodistrian University of Athens (NKUOA), officially founded in April 14th, 1837, is the first University not only of Greece but both the Balkan peninsula and the Eastern Mediterranean region.
The Institute of Accelerating Systems and Applications (IASA) was founded in 1994 in order to promote research and postgraduate studies in the Greek University system. It is affiliated with six university departments: Medicine, Physics and Informatics of the NKUOA and Electrical & Computer Engineering, Chemical Engineering and General Science of the NTUA. IASA also has a number of support divisions, ranging from computing and electronics to medical physics, which support and enhance the capabilities of the individual research areas. IASA is an autonomous legal entity governed by a Board of Directors elected by the governing bodies of the two Universities and it is managed by a directorate appointed by the Senates of the two Universities. Its developmental program and its operating funds are directly provided by the Ministry of Education which exercises direct financial oversight over the Institute. IASA is the largest research institute operating under the auspices of the Ministry of Education (Greece). It has assembled significant teams of faculty members from the university departments along with post-doctoral associates and PhD students. Many of these faculty members receive support for their work through both national and international funding sources. The research program varies from Basic Physics to Medicine.

 

Working Group

The working group has designed and written the HYPATIA interactive tool for High Energy Physics events used in The International Masterclasses by many students and teachers in 39 countries. Also the group has developed the HYPATIA applet a more flexible version which runs of the internet and does not need downloading.
The group has coordinated and run the EU-LLP project “Learning with ATLAS @CERN“ which is now finished. And is now coordinating the “Discover the COSMOS” EU Coordination action project.
The group leader has received, together with Dr.Sofoklis Sotiriou the 2011 EPS Price for Physics Outreach.

 

Involvement in PATHWAY

The KNUOA/IASA team supports the Pathway implementation activities which promote effective interactions between schools and front-end research. 
It is the overall responsible for task 3.3 namely the educational activities which promote school –research center collaboration. For this purpose it has already created and defined a number of best practices (international Masterclasses, interactive analysis tools for HEP experiments,the Learning with ATLAS portal etc) which are being implemented and used by teachers internationally.

 

The Team